There are many ways we can do this, and the choice is yours

March 27, 2019 1:02 PM

To commemorate the 25 anniversary of their Elder Scrolls series of RPG videogames, Bethesda Softworks is making the third chapter of the series, Morrowind, available for free download on PC for a limited time. If you're wondering what the big deal is behind the game, Alex Kane from Polygon interviewed the creative team behind it in Morrowind: An Oral History.

Previous chapters of The Elder Scrolls, Arena and Daggerfall were released for free for the 10th and 15th anniversaries respectively.

If you're looking to make the game run better on modern machines, Morrowind's modding community, which is still active after all these years, has your back. The two most recommended options are to use a combination of Morrowind Graphics Extender XE and the Morrowind Code Patch, or to load the game's data files into OpenMW a free, open source re-implementation of Morrowind's original game engine that runs natively in Linux, MacOS, and Windows. Once you're up and running, there are plenty of other quality-of-life and graphics improvement mods available to choose from.

Bethesda, true to their reputation, originally intended for Morrowind to be free for a single day, only to have their servers melt down under the demand. The promotion has now been extended through the 31st of March.

posted by radwolf76 (44 comments total)

I'll vouch for OpenMW running flawlessly on Windows 10. Some mods (mostly ones that use Morrowind Script Extender, which fortunately is not as ubiquitous as its Oblivion and Skyrim counterparts) don't work on OpenMW, but many of them do.
posted by tobascodagama at 1:07 PM on March 27, 2019

The ending of the words is ALMSIVI!
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 1:10 PM on March 27, 2019 [6 favorites]

Morrowind was the first game to make me repeatedly stop running around completing quests and actually stare at my surroundings. The nighttime sky, the silt striders, the Telvanni mushroom houses - I usually don't care much about the graphics in a game but Morrowind continually surprised and tickled me with incredibly interesting the world they'd made was. I'm playing Skyrim now and am glad they've continued the tradition (though I did prefer Morrowind's less hand-holdy approach to quests). Morrowind was and continues to be a great game.

And I still have a soft spot for cliff racers.
posted by DingoMutt at 1:13 PM on March 27, 2019 [9 favorites]

I spend a... significant... amount of time as a teen building mods for Morrowind, in fact under this exact username. Fighting the scripting engine, mostly. The scripting engine is very, very bad for anything that isn't programming a fetch quest.
posted by BungaDunga at 1:37 PM on March 27, 2019 [5 favorites]

Something I really appreciate about Morrowind is that even the origin story and identity of the protagonist is left up to the player to make decisions about. Its approach to both history and religious studies are refreshing alternatives to the bulk of mainstream other-world fantasy which offers only one interpretation, and usually some sort of in-world sage or text to deliver "the truth." What you're given instead are multiple conflicting accounts by people who have their own biases and interests. Do you trust "word of god" when the god testifying is an admitted liar (and perhaps the most honest of the three for that admission)? What about the madman under the mountain? Will you be the one, or become one of the many shades who failed to become the one? And if you complete the main quest, is it because you were the one or because you were the only one who survived?

Curiously I just saw The Matrix trilogy, and it offers similar ambiguities for at least some part of its narrative. Dragon Age: Inquisition gives you the opportunity to be a skeptical Inquisitor, but that's only a few dialogue options and isn't really sustained. And I think Bioware is half of what it was in terms of game writing and about 1/4th of what fans think it is. I'm sure that their writer's room has a canon truth that they're being coy about, and will reveal with some variant on Starchild.

Morrowind also seems to run under Steam's Proton, although I've not really stress tested it.
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 1:47 PM on March 27, 2019 [5 favorites]

Well that's frustrating. I redeemed the code, hoping to download and play it on Mac with OpenMW, but.... the site just directs me to a launcher.
I think I've got a working windows VM around here somewhere to use to run the launcher to get the data files...
posted by flaterik at 3:25 PM on March 27, 2019

And if you complete the main quest, is it because you were the one or because you were the only one who survived?

Really, it was because I created such an overpowered and pumped up dungeon clearing atack spell that I one - shotted the baddy without really realizing it. Oops. And then I avoided going back to complete the quest because there were a couple obscure corners of the island I wanted to check out for an exquisite skirt.

Let's talk about the most vitally important party of the game: THE Outfits.

Seriously, I spent more time maximizing my skills so I could wear glass armor then I did on the main quest. I scoured guilds, wizard homes< and dungeons for every peice of expensive, extravagant and exquisite. OK, granted Exquisite clothing, rings and amulets were best for enchanting, but still. I got a modded mansion just to display clothing.

Other crpgs I gamely followed the plot. But in Morrowind, I was a clothes horse who pretty much accidentally saved the island. "Oh, dear, was that the evil god Demon or whatever? Oh well, are there any nice outfits here?"

And I never looked back. Morrowind has completely wiped my sense of games. I now judge your favorite genre based on how nice the clothing selection is.

Anyway, gotta run I understand Pokémon Go released a new set of clothing...
posted by happyroach at 3:44 PM on March 27, 2019 [13 favorites]

flaterik: My understanding is that you do need to get the launcher to download the game, but once you've downloaded it you can easily disregard the launcher and make your own shortcut directly to the game files.
posted by Pfardentrott at 4:13 PM on March 27, 2019

...And apparently the launcher does require Windows, as you suggested in your comment. Sorry. Hope you can find a workaround!
posted by Pfardentrott at 4:17 PM on March 27, 2019

I have rolled an Imperial archer Marcus Rose, he has impeccable hair and is very confused about this Morrowind place, but he likes the fancy skirts that he can wear over his chitin armor.
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 7:25 PM on March 27, 2019

Such a great game. I think the thing that most strikingly distinguishes Morrowind from its successors is that Morrowind was one of the last great RPGs before modern conveniences like quest markers and fast travel became ubiquitous. In Morrowind, if you wanted to find Caius Cosades, you would listen carefully to the quest giver's instructions about where he was likely to be, consult the paper map that came with the game to find what road you should take (or carefully attend to the wooden road signs in game), travel there by foot (or hire a silt strider), ask an NPC at your destination as to his whereabouts, follow that NPC's directions to Caius's house, get a bit lost along the way, ask yet another NPC to help point you in the right direction, and finally find your way there. In short, it was a credible simulation of the experience of navigating an unfamiliar landscape, and it was amazing what a strong sense of place and distance one developed. (There were fast travel options—silt striders and teleportation scrolls and such—but they all had an in-game logic and sharp limitations to their use.)

In subsequent games you just click through the quest giver's dialogue, teleport across the world via your world map, follow the quest marker for the last little jaunt, and you're done. A terrific and popular convenience, but such a loss in depth and immersion and sense of place.

Morrowind also had beautifully unique environments: distinctive towns and villages and settlements with carefully constructed architectural differences and unique cultural practices. Oblivion's Cyrodiil was such a bland place by comparison, just a vast landscape of forgettable Imperial cities and cookie-cutter Ayleid ruins. In Oblivion and Skyrim, you can abstain from fast travel and install a mod to turn off quest markers, but it doesn't really work; the NPC dialogue isn't designed to give you enough information to find your targets on your own.

I don't begrudge anyone their quest markers and fast travel, but I do wish there were at least a few story-rich RPGs still experimenting with meticulously crafted worlds that feel like a real place that you have to learn to navigate by dead reckoning—where you can occasionally feel lost and maybe even a little bit nervous about how you're going to find your way back to town, or where you can stop and ask directions if you're not sure of the way. It seems like a thing that's just not being explored at all anymore; Elder Scrolls and The Witcher and Assassin's Creed and Tomb Raider and a hundred others are cloning the same formula of a richly populated world map that you can teleport around freely. They're all fun games with often beautiful environments, but without the same sense of place and exploration and learning to find your way. (There are a few exceptions, like Dark Souls, but Dark Souls is missing the story and dialogue and has a famously brutal learning curve.) In this golden age of PC gaming, I'd like to occasionally have the experience of getting to know a game world in the same intimate and personal way that I knew Vvardenfell.
posted by Syllepsis at 9:54 PM on March 27, 2019 [12 favorites]

OK, I was able to get it running in Linux.

You can go ahead and download the Bethesda Launcher. The Bethesda Launcher works in Wine, except there's an annoying issue that prevents it from downloading a game (you get an error message). To get around that, run the launcher and log in, then go into the "Bethesda.net Launcher" folder (wherever your wine path puts it) and delete or rename cdpprod.dch (this is mentioned on appDB, but it took me a few tries for it to work -- I think the key is that you need to run the program and log in before you delete the file). You should be able to download the game after that.

Install OpenMW, and when you run it for the first time, use the installation wizard to find Morrowind.esm, which by default is in [wine C:/program files etc]/Bethesda.net Launcher/games/Morrowind/Data Files/

The version you get from Bethesda includes two add-ons, and if you have any trouble running the game, you can change the loading order in OpenMW so that bloodmoon.esm is loaded last.

It runs really smoothly for me.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 10:07 PM on March 27, 2019 [2 favorites]

In this golden age of PC gaming, I'd like to occasionally have the experience of getting to know a game world in the same intimate and personal way that I knew Vvardenfell.

Well, this did feel like one of the core parts of Breath of the Wild... Eventually you've got a map and fast travel, but there's a good chunk of the game spent wandering a blank map, not knowing at all what you're going to find.
posted by kaibutsu at 12:30 AM on March 28, 2019 [2 favorites]

Free download yay except you have to use their stupid launcher boo.
posted by GallonOfAlan at 6:00 AM on March 28, 2019

Morrowind is the first game I made a mod for. A little mini-quest that granted a ring that could take you to several fast-travel points when you put it on. Because on your third or fourth playthrough, the walking can get tedious.

I do miss that sense of exploration Syllepsis mentioned. I used to play Final Fantasy XIV Online, and when the Next Big Expansion would hit, rather than dive into quests, I used to love exploring these brand new zones (often at great risk, because hello new level cap!)

I am kind of sad that in Skyrim and ESO, the Argonians don't do the Morrowind wedgie walk. :(
posted by xedrik at 6:54 AM on March 28, 2019 [1 favorite]

Totally agree that morrowind was the last great RPG. The huge difference between morrowind and oblivion/skyrim was, for me, dialogue.

Morrowind let you read so much about topics, in a wikipedia-like click hole fashion. But with Oblivion, the dialogue was all recorded and so it had much less breadth.

On the other hand, oblivion brought Living Cities, which morrowind totally lacked. Hello random villager that has been standing in this crossroads for the past 6 months, good to see you again.

I adore the morrowind guilds and factions. You can only pick one, you can't be the chief of competing guilds. You can work to resolve their differences, but you have to pick one. It rewarded replaying the game.

And, I enjoyed the.... list fetch quests. It was a self challenge. You weren't sent to get twelve wolf pelts, you were sent to visit the twelve shrines, just so you could.

Last point, the economy hacking, the level up hacking were terrible. The combat was pretty bad. Having enough money to enchant a truly powerful item was very sad. Finding a vendor who could afford to deal with you was awful. It would be really, really amazing to add a passive income mod - maybe a store you could invest in that would return a percent investment but require upkeep or something? hmm. hmm hmm hmm.
posted by rebent at 7:15 AM on March 28, 2019 [1 favorite]

A little mini-quest that granted a ring that could take you to several fast-travel points when you put it on. Because on your third or fourth playthrough, the walking can get tedious.


Oh, wow. I think I might have used that mod. Did it also have a feature where you could mark a spot and recall to it later?
posted by Mr. Bad Example at 7:30 AM on March 28, 2019

Mark and Recall were spells that you could learn right from the get go (if you could learn spells).

One of the expansion packs added a fast-travel network, a series of pylons, that you could warp among.
posted by rebent at 7:35 AM on March 28, 2019 [1 favorite]

I never played Morrowind, so now's my chance! I've only played a little bit since yesterday. I don't mind dated graphics at all (although the wedgie walk is kind of distracting), and I love how the quests are like "go out the village and take a left when you get to the two trees, then look for the cave entrance at the end of the pond." It's like getting directions from my uncle.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 7:36 AM on March 28, 2019 [3 favorites]

A little mini-quest that granted a ring that could take you to several fast-travel points when you put it on. Because on your third or fourth playthrough, the walking can get tedious.

What I used to deal with this is the Boots of Blinding Speed, which make you ludicrously fast but at the cost of not being able to see. Combine that with one enchanted item to pump up your magic resistance to counteract the blindness and another enchanted item to give you permanent levitation, and presto -- permanent supersonic flight.
posted by bassooner at 8:35 AM on March 28, 2019 [4 favorites]

It would be really, really amazing to add a passive income mod - maybe a store you could invest in that would return a percent investment but require upkeep or something

I'm certain I remember a mod like this existing, but it's been a decade and it's rotted out of both my memories, and, likely the internet.

There are also two "Intervention" spells that will warp you to the nearest Imperial or local shrine (depending on which spell). If you learn where those spells take you, you can often zip around the map fairly fast.

One popular mod is Multi-Mark, which gave you several Mark slots that you set and Recall to at will. But I think a lot of peoples' first mods was building a "warp room" that you could open a door to in your favorite cities and use to pop out in any of the others. Certainly it was a popular feature in many elaborate house mods.
posted by BungaDunga at 8:54 AM on March 28, 2019 [1 favorite]

For fans of the music, I offer a Morrowind chiptune medley for your perusal, courtesy of Mr. Thirteenthletter: (Part 1, Part 2)
posted by thirteenthletter at 9:03 AM on March 28, 2019 [2 favorites]

I definitely enjoy the irony where everybody complained about the fast travel in Oblivion but there were so many fast travel mods for Morrowind.

I mean, I *get it*, it's really about the immersion, and using a Multi-Mark spell or teleport room or whatever feels more CHIM than just clicking a map marker. I just find it amusing, is all.
posted by tobascodagama at 9:19 AM on March 28, 2019 [3 favorites]

The real breaking thing in Oblivion was the GPS that made navigation completely worthless- just follow the quest marker and you'll find the next place to go. Skyrim doubled down and added a spell that literally draws a pathway to your next quest location, which turns the player into an NPC following a pathfinding algorithm.
posted by BungaDunga at 10:40 AM on March 28, 2019 [1 favorite]

Assassin's Creed: Odyssey actually does a good job with this. Fast travel works to towns, and overlook spots on mountains, but not every location. Quest directions are not completely vague, but do require you to hunt a bit sometimes ("east of so-and-so")- once you are close, you'll get a ping notification, and you can use your Magic Bird to hunt down the actual quest objective. It's way better than Skyrim, even if it's much, much easier than Morrowind.
posted by BungaDunga at 10:43 AM on March 28, 2019

I wish I had known about this link before I had hastily composed this FPP yesterday while trying to get ready for work, but the Oral History mentions a creative team member, Doug Goodall, who had quit the project and declined to contribute to Polygon's interviews. Two months ago one of the posters on the TES Lore subreddit compiled a post detailing an interview Doug had given to one of the main Elder Scrolls fan sites around the time of the release of Oblivion. Goodall outlines the reasons he quit, and it ended up stirring up quite a bit of drama. The post also covers the apology that he made, and signed "Dark Lord of Negativity".
posted by radwolf76 at 11:35 AM on March 28, 2019 [4 favorites]

I think the Clairvoyance spell in Skyrim is actually an ideal solution to the accessibility problem posed by complex RPGs. Players who need the help can get it without breaking immersion by looking up stuff on a wiki, while players who don't need it get to save the mana and spell slot.
posted by tobascodagama at 12:09 PM on March 28, 2019 [3 favorites]

I played Oblivion, then Skyrim, and a couple years ago purchased Morrowind.

And I just can't do it. I tried, in fact I've tried on at least three separate occasions, and I just can't. The bizarre "you click and the animation shows you hit, but the dice rolling shows you didn't so fuck you" game mechanic drives me up the wall, but to be honest it's mostly the graphics.

I don't like to think of myself as a graphics snob, but I guess I am. The interactions are kind of jerky, which doesn't help, but I'm just too used to smoother graphics and animation. I hate that, because I love so much else about Morrowind that I encountered in my several attempts to play it.

I love the non-handholding quest setup. "Yeah, it's up the road a ways, then turn left at the stump", there you go! That's cool and beats the compass with GPS stuff approach later Elder Scrolls.

I love the depth of lore!

I especially love, from the reviews anyway, the completely ambiguous and open interpretation of the whole prophecy thing, including in the game the explicit acknowledgement that simply by doing what people might think of as what the chosen one would do you might, perhaps, become the chosen one. Or at least become them in a sense that's close enough.

But apparently I'm sufficiently shallow that the old school graphics and that weird not really hitting people mechanism just stops me cold.
posted by sotonohito at 1:11 PM on March 28, 2019 [3 favorites]

Yeah, the to-hit dice roll thing is a little obnoxious. It'd be much less so if you had some kind of soft target-locking where you didn't need to be all that precise, but the fact that the game checks whether the hit-boxes intersected and then makes a to-hit roll for you is a bit worst-of-both-worlds.

It's one of those really binary mechanics, too, where it's a big deal in the early game and then not a thing at all in the mid-late game once you've got a few levels in your chosen attack skill. (Or good enchanted gear.)
posted by tobascodagama at 1:43 PM on March 28, 2019 [2 favorites]

to be honest it's mostly the graphics.

Part of the fun of Morrowind is being able to mod the graphics, if you like endlessly tinkering with mods. There's only so much that can be done, but the world can be made fairly nice in a retro way.
posted by BungaDunga at 1:57 PM on March 28, 2019 [1 favorite]

Thank you, radwolf76, for the extra context on Doug Goodall and his departure from Bethesda before Morrowind was complete. I ended up reading the entire long Reddit thread where three of his interviews are reposted.

It's remarkable how bad leadership was at a tech company in 2001. That sort of prolonged personality conflict, that everyone could see every day, that was obviously damaging the project, that went on for so long-- it's like Boss 101 to nip that sort of thing in the bud, by managing the friction in a productive way, or by moving someone out of the team if you have to. I mean there are managers at gas stations who understand and can do this simple act of leadership.

But what is amazing to me is that there is every evidence almost 20 years later that leadership across most of the tech sector is still that bad. Seriously, these guys need some competition to make them learn good habits and best business practices-- like taking care of your employees, and making sure projects get finished.
posted by seasparrow at 8:34 PM on March 28, 2019 [5 favorites]

I'm really thankful I could get my hands on this, for the PC. I just finishing resurrecting an old laptop the day before it became available, and it installed and runs with no issue. Now, I can finish the main quest, that I couldn't finish originally on the XBox version, because there was a gash in the CD.

But before I do that, I need to learn the controls - otherwise Squish the Dark Elf Thief is going to keep on getting pummeled by mudcrabs because I'm lockpicking them instead of stabbing them.
posted by spinifex23 at 9:01 PM on March 28, 2019 [1 favorite]

Really, there were only two places one needed to mark: that damn crab merchant out in the ass-end of nowhere that had nearly unlimited funds, and your own specially modded mansion. Everywhere else could be gotten to with the supersonic boots trick.

Morrowind wasnt just fashion, it was also all about the overpowered magic. My Breton mage made this ridiculous combination of resistance reduction, damage over two seconds and area effect that could turn an entire tomb from a pit of horrors to am underground shopping mall in one shot. I called it Dragon Slave, and i always wanted a mood that would pay the dialogue to go with it.

And for tougher critters I made an even more lethal spell that did damage for five seconds.Because nothing. No god or demon or pterosaur. NOTHING was going to stand between me and those pretty outfgits.
posted by happyroach at 11:26 PM on March 28, 2019 [4 favorites]

Well that's frustrating. I redeemed the code, hoping to download and play it on Mac with OpenMW, but.... the site just directs me to a launcher.

If you buy it through Steam you can download it and play on Mac, using these instructions from Openmw.
posted by little onion at 5:36 AM on March 29, 2019

The OpenMW 0.45 commentary video is out!
posted by BungaDunga at 8:30 AM on March 29, 2019 [1 favorite]

I can't seem to hit anything. And then I died in the cave to that cat guy I let go... WTF

So hard to get used to the controls.
posted by Windopaene at 11:42 AM on March 29, 2019

One thing that makes a huge difference that you can eventually learn from asking NPCs for a "little secret" enough times is that your chance to succeed at anything -- dodging, spell casting, making a persuasion check, and most importantly attacking with a weapon -- is affected by your current Fatigue level. At 50% of your max Fatigue, you break even. Below that, you suffer a penalty. Above it, you get a bonus. The closer to 100%, the bigger the bonus. The closer to 0%, the worse the penalty.

So, when you're starting out and your weapon skills are crap, you want to make sure to stay as close to 100% Fatigue as possible during a fight. You also take less damage that way.

Two other things you can do:

Starting out with your weapon of choice as one of our Major Skills means you get a higher skill level to begin with, which means you miss less to begin with.

Also, all Bound Weapons have a Constant Effect enchantment that boosts your relevant weapon skill by 10. That makes the Bound Weapon skills really useful, since you won't be able to make a better enchantment until later in the game. There's a merchant you can find fairly early into the game -- along the main quest route, even -- who sells enchanted items that have Bound Weapon as an on-use effect. So you can take advantage of the spell even if you're not a caster.
posted by tobascodagama at 5:57 PM on March 29, 2019 [3 favorites]

ah yes, the character build system. This is something that I never enjoyed and never thought was perfected in later releases, but skyrim had many good changes.

I was a min-maxer when i payed Morrowind. There are only so many level ups possible between when you start and when you hit level 100. Each time you level up, you can increase your base stats. And if you use skills that relate to a base stat, you will get a x2 or x3 bonus for that stat.

So, leveling up needs to be very intentional. If you follow a plan, you can be x3 as powerful when you hit level 100 than if you just play the game without thinking about it.

And this took a lot of the fun out of it. This turned it into more of a chore.

It got so frustrating for me that, when I picked up the game about 5 years ago for a replay, the first thing I did was open the console and set my stats to 100 across the board, so I could simply ignore the entire leveling system and play the game for the discovery and plot elements.
posted by rebent at 5:39 AM on March 30, 2019 [2 favorites]

The first thing I did for both Morrowind and Oblivion back in the day was install mods to kill the attribute leveling stuff dead, yeah. That and make Endurance levels apply retroactively to your HP. (Your extra HP on level up is based on your Endurance attribute at the time, so you get way more HP from leveling Endurance from 40 to 45 at level 2 than by doing the same thing at level 10.)
posted by tobascodagama at 6:37 AM on March 30, 2019

It turns out someone upscaled the Morrowind textures with a neural net recently and the results are very nice. They're not at all perfect- you could probably get clearer results with a wholesale replacement texture pack- but they're lovely if you want to play something that's as close as possible to the original game without being blurry and muddy. Humanoid faces look especially improved.
posted by BungaDunga at 10:04 PM on March 31, 2019 [2 favorites]

Huh! I'll have to check the Morrowwind textures thing, that could be a big help. And maybe cheat to skip some of the grindy you look like you hit but you really didn't, ha stuff.
posted by sotonohito at 8:15 AM on April 1, 2019

I just restarted with the texture pack above, Better Bodies, and Better Heads. Everyone still looks a bit goofy but it's a small step up from wooden drawing dolls with painted Russian-doll faces of vanilla.

I'm also using Linora's Leveling but have not done enough with to evaluate how it changes game balance. (No more stabbing things with a spear just because spears level endurance which increases your health.)
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 7:12 AM on April 2, 2019 [1 favorite]

The thing about Efficient Leveling in Morrowind is that the game world has fixed levels, unlike Oblivion and Skyrim, so it doesn't really matter that much if you don't skill-watch with 100% efficiency. You can just stick around in the zones that you have the stats for until you either gain sufficient levels to get to the next one or (perhaps more likely) obtain the resources required to craft a spell or enchanted item strong enough to overcome the gaps in your innate stats.

There's a reason that the game hands out the Scrolls of Icarian Flight and the Boots of Blinding Speed in what's essentially its starter zone. It's a huge hint to the player that the "right" approach to progressing through the game is to craft or obtain a collection of stupidly broken items, and your character's skills are mostly just a means to that end.
posted by tobascodagama at 11:17 AM on April 2, 2019

Good points. Two of the issues I had with Oblivion was 1) leveled mobs that made surviving without metagaming annoying and 2) when you get to the end of the main storyline after a few dozen levels of metagaming, having to escort a Martin Septim who would die if you level-30 sneezed in his direction.
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 11:38 AM on April 2, 2019 [2 favorites]